NYT, pg1: Obama’s Campaign Tightens Control of Image and Access

Obama’s Campaign Tightens Control of Image and Access
By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: June 19, 2008

....While the strategy has won compliments from political professionals of both parties, who say Mr. Obama’s campaign is exhibiting a high level of discipline, it has also created some early turbulence for a candidate who has run on promises of openness and cultivated a grass-roots following and a cottage industry of homemade campaign videos, memorabilia and street murals.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is making a transition typical of any newly minted presidential nominee preparing for a general election race. It mirrors the stagecraft once so successfully practiced by the campaigns of President Bush to the envy — and, sometimes, anger — of Democrats....

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....Strategists for Mr. Obama, the country’s first black nominee, have made it clear that they believe they need to take extra steps to control his image and protect against attack. But such efforts at times appear to conflict with the candidate’s stated desire to be unusually transparent and open, and they have already occasionally put him at loggerheads with news organizations pushing for greater access to him now that he is the presumptive nominee....

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Tensions between Mr. Obama’s campaign and the news media broke into full view when aides announced two weeks ago that he was flying to Chicago but then sent his plane — and traveling press corps — there while he stayed in Washington to meet with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The bureau chiefs of the major television news networks and The Associated Press wrote Mr. Obama’s top aides a stern letter on June 6, saying, “There are many ways in a campaign to control your message and conduct private meetings that do not involve deceiving the press corps.” The letter continued, “Going forward, we know from experience that covering a presidential campaign requires that some representatives of the press corps be with, or near, the senator at all times as part of the ‘security package,’ just as the White House press corps is with the president.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/politics/19campaign.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

You helped get us into the mess we are in. Obama's going to try to get us out of it, despite your best efforts to elect McCain.

press rarely burns him--they love their war hero and won't report his gaffes and inconsistencies, for the most part. They are jackals when it comes to Obama.

*sigh* If they would spend more time investigating and reporting news, and less time making the "news" about themselves, we never would have gotten into the mess we're now in.

When I was in J-School, our professors told us to be actual reporters, we'd either work here for a foreign press, or just go overseas. This was in the early 90s. They were so right. That is why I left journalism. It was a sham.

Play Nice with them